Accelerando Stross, Charles Published: 2005 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction Source: http://www.accelerando.org/ 1 About Stross: Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born Leeds, October 18, 1964) is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy. Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries in- clude Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod and Liz Williams. Obvious in- spirations include Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, among other cyberpunk and postcyberpunk writers. His first published short story, "The Boys", appeared in Interzone in 1987: his first novel, Singularity Sky was published by Ace in 2003 and was nom- inated for the Hugo Award. A collection of his short stories, Toast: And Other Rusted Futures appeared in 2002. Subsequent short stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and other awards. His novella "The Concrete Jungle" won the Hugo award for its category in 2005. Most recently, Accelerando won the 2006 Locus Award for best science fiction novel, was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the year's best science fiction novel, and was on the final bal- lot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. Glasshouse is on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. In the 1970s and 1980s, Stross published some role-playing game articles for Ad- vanced Dungeons & Dragons in the White Dwarf magazine. Some of his creatures, such as the death knight, githyanki (borrowed from George R. R. Martin's book, Dying of the Light), githzerai, and slaad were later published in the Fiend Folio monster compendium. In addition to work- ing as a writer of fiction he has worked as a technical author, freelance journalist, programmer, and pharmacist at different times. He holds de- grees in Pharmacy and Computer Science. Rogue Farm, a machinima film based on his 2003 short story of the same title, debuted in August 2004. He is one of the Guests of Honour at Orbital 2008 the British Na- tional Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) in March 2008. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Stross: • Appeals Court (2005) • Scratch Monkey (1993) • Jury Service (2002) Copyright: Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. 2 Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes. 3 License Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: * Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. * Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. * No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the li- cense terms of this work. If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org. 4 Acknowledgements This book took me five years to write – a personal record – and would not exist without the support and encouragement of a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Cle- ments, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory – my neural prostheses are off- line.) I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Hol- man at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice. Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the peri- ods when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate. 5 For Feòrag, with love 6 Part 1 Slow Takeoff 7 "The question of whether a computer can think is no more inter- esting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." – Edsger W. Dijkstra 8 Chapter 1 Lobsters Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich. It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to be- come very rich indeed. He wonders who it's going to be. Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watch- ing the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curl- ingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press re- leases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely wav- ing in front of the scenery. A couple of punks – maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar – are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shad- ows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to 9 meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first- century style, and forget about his personal problems. He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low- bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?" He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti colli- sion LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance. "I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar- code reader. "Who's it from?" "FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions. Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash – cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere. The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?" The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer." "Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously. "Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU." "I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear care- fully, as if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line. "Nyet – no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist se- miotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?" Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the lan- guage just so you could talk to me?" 10 . Accelerando Stross, Charles Published: 2005 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction Source: http://www .accelerando. org/ 1 About Stross: Charles David. novella "The Concrete Jungle" won the Hugo award for its category in 2005. Most recently, Accelerando won the 2006 Locus Award for best science fiction novel, was a finalist for the John. this work. If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www .accelerando. org. 4 Acknowledgements This book took me five years to write – a personal record –